Posts tagged:#Orientalism

The study of migration is interdisciplinary. Despite this, I have not come across much discussion in literary studies about the role that contemporary human migration plays on the way we read and what we choose to read. While universities would like to present themselves as progressive through a nod to Postcolonial Studies, in the arts we fall into the trap of discussing migration as if it is a static thing of the past and not alive today. This is because most discussion in the arts about migration is retrospective and looks to history for examples of human migration and migration crises, rather than looking at the situation today. I would like to move away from the institutional focus on the history of human migration. Instead, through analysis of The Road to Wanting by Wendy Law-Yone, I will be focusing on what the migrant has to say about themselves, their own existence, and their experiences in a contemporary context. By doing so I hope to centre conversation on the migrant’s agency and personhood.

It was in my fourth year of university that I came across Leila Aboulela, shelved under ‘suggested further reading’ for a seminar on a Postcolonialism course. Indeed, before taking this course, my exposure to non-western writers within required reading was limited to the obligatory inclusion of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in my second year. Although Aboulela’s novel The Translator occasionally crops up on postcolonial syllabi, it is her unflinching approach to colonialism in ‘The Museum’ that captured my attention and caused me to question museum ethics and neutrality. The 1997 short story’s value has not gone unrecognised elsewhere: it was the first winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000. The 19-page tale paints the story of Shadia, a Sudanese woman studying at Aberdeen, and her acquaintance with a fellow student – a long-haired Scot named Bryan. The predominant theme of the story is the struggle of communication between colonialism’s ‘predetermined groups’, and while Bryan and Shadia begin to bridge the gap in communication, this is halted when they visit a local museum at the story’s denouement, culminating with Shadia’s announcement, ‘I shouldn’t be here with you. You shouldn’t talk to me…’ (Aboulela 18).

In his superb essay Africa’s Tarnished Name, Chinua Achebe asserts that “colonisation gave the world… a particular way of looking (or, rather, not looking) at Africa that endures, alas, into our own day” (1998: 20). I see this way of looking every day in my social anthropology studies. Africa in our curriculum appears only in relation to those topics that are most exotic to the Western consciousness — like witchcraft and magic — and those of strife and poverty that too often dominate the discourse around our continent.

Over the years, I have read numerous novels, short stories, and poems in which I have seen myself reflected in characters, events, and language, but it wasn’t until a class on Orientalism (1978), Edward Said’s seminal text, during my masters that I saw my experiences echoed in a work of cultural criticism. In Orientalism, Said posits that the West’s complicated relationship with the Middle East is rooted and exacerbated by its reductive framing of the “Orient” as a backward, barbaric, and exotic space. Said argues that these attitudes are irrevocably linked to the West’s history of imperialism in these geographies, meaning that these perceptions are the product of a power play over the governments and peoples of these diverse countries, an attempt to criticise and diminish their cultures and identities in order to justify the conquest of their land.